


In The Days Long Vanished

by Alinya



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Mid-Season, Season/Series 07, Unrequited Crush
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:55:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26068324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alinya/pseuds/Alinya
Summary: For a moment the madness of the mission and time travel lets up. And for a moment, Deke and Nana are able to talk.
Relationships: Deke Shaw & Jemma Simmons, Deke Shaw & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Skye | Daisy Johnson/Daniel Sousa
Comments: 25
Kudos: 50





	In The Days Long Vanished

They are laughing over something when Deke spots them from across the lab. Some piece of tech Bugsie doesn’t understand, or something of that ilk. Or so he supposes, because he can’t actually hear them. He’s not really trying to, anyway, not sure he _wants_ to hear them. He considers briefly throwing the multitool across the room, only that wouldn’t change anything and he’d have to explain why he’d done it when the pair of them inevitably notice. Somehow _Because he’ll be giving you lemons next_ isn’t a sentence Deke wants to say out loud to Daisy. Not least because he’s pretty sure now that Coulson and Mack were having him on about that. That Lemons were not and never have been a thing in this – the other? Previous? – timeline. Maybe he’ll suggest they are to Danny Boy anyway. Only he won’t. It would be churlish, or childish or some other -ish his mother would have disavowed.

Something – no, someone – jostles his elbow, which leads to Deke’s hand jarring against the wearable tech he’s supposed to be wrangling. Something to help with knowing where and when the jumps are coming. Someone smells of lab work, all chemicals and latex gloves, and the tea she has brought him. There is the chink of metal against china as her wedding ring jostles that, too. Still, none of the tea is lost in transition. It's a skill of hers.

‘Nana,’ he says, and offers her a smile. He doesn’t quite feel the smile, not really; it’s a facsimile he has conjured lest she feel offended by his current state of Eeyorism, which is in no way her fault. But Nana will know all about that, Deke thinks, and wonders just how often she’s done the same thing.

 _I’m sorry_ , she had said once, ages ago, on a particularly gruelling day, _You didn’t deserve that_.

‘Sorry,’ says Nana now, and somehow that makes the smile a real one. ‘You looked like you needed it.’

She sets a mug in front of him. It’s the one with the thick china and the cross cat on the front – Bobo’s favourite by all accounts, and it would be comforting except that Deke is fairly sure this is one of those details Nana has had to conveniently misplace. No, that’s not quite it. Temporarily forfeited, maybe.

She’s watching him watch them now; Deke feels this more than he sees it, still half-bent over the would-be watch. It makes the back of his neck prickle a little, an after-effect of life in a far-off Lighthouse. It's an uncanny counterpoint to the curls of steam tickling his nose.

‘Terrible luck, the pair of you,’ says Nana. Deke hmms indeterminately, and she gestures in the direction of Daisy, Sousa, and whatever the joke is at the far end of the room.

‘You and Fitz,’ Nana says, apparently clarifying everything. She’s not, for the record. He looks slantwise at her and says, ‘Ah, Fitz did all right.’

She smiles in her turn, fleeting as a sunburst on a cloudy spring afternoon. ‘I wish he were here,’ she says, wistful. Deke is all set to agree, has actually opened his mouth to do so, but she’s already pressed on. ‘He’d be much better at this. Know what to say. He would understand about...' She doesn't finish, only inclines her head Daisyward. 'Well,' she says, 'he'd understand about that. Being on the wrong side of it, and the awful timing and how sometimes things - they miss their mark. '

'I don't know what you mean,' says Deke. He affects nonchalance but suspects Nana of seeing straight through that, too. What she says though, still wistful is, 'Fitz was so good to me after – did we tell you about Maveth? And Will? And all I did was shout at him.’

‘No!’ says Deke. ‘No you have not! But I can put the pieces together, okay? Just how many planets have you been stranded on? And – and there were… _people_ …before Bobo?’

Somehow, this last feels most improbable of all. Deke has seen her and Fitz together, the synchronicity of them. It was one thing to hear his mother go on about it – and after that his father – but now he’s _seen_ it and it doesn’t begin to compare to the stories. The idea that Nana and Bobo were ever not – well, not _them_ is impossible. But Nana is laughing, her nose and eyes scrunched with it. It’s nice, which is why, he tells himself, he doesn’t mind her laughing at him. Also, it’s just nice to be in on a joke. Even if he’s not quite in on this one, more part of its makeup. Nana bats his shoulder playfully with the hand not wrapped around her own tea.

‘Oh Deke,’ she says, half-exasperated, half-affectionate, ‘of _course_ there were.’ 

‘And were there lemons? I mean, you gave them to this Will person?’

‘There weren’t even oranges,’ says Nan, never missing a beat.

‘Well, that sounds miserable,’ says Deke. ‘What kind of dystopian planet was that on?’

‘You have no idea, Nana says, leaving Deke with very little doubt that he really, really doesn’t at that. Then she presses a tea-warmed hand to his cheek and it's all so gentle and fragile and so instinctually protective that Deke knows in his bones he never wants to find out. He underlines this mental note when just as suddenly Nana's hand slips away leaving cool, climate-controlled air in its wake. Deke resists the impulse to shiver.

He has long since given up on the counter for the watch. He’ll get to it when he gets to it. Much better to sit like this, and talk of remember-whens, the curious smell of tea, memory ad tech between them. Daisy and Sousa are still playing whatever verbal tennis they’re playing at the far end of the room, but it matters a bit less now because there’s Nana, and the mug of tea he’s almost forgotten about. He picks it up. It smells soothing, the steam gently searing his nostrils.

‘So,’ he says, ‘what did Bobo do? I mean, it obviously worked out. With the planet, and him, and all that, I mean. Not so much the not leaving each other’s sides, like you _promised_ , but…’

‘Drink your tea, Deke,’ Nana says. ‘And he dove through a rock through spacetime for me. Twice, as it fell out.’

Deke splutters around his tea, which leads to him choking and Nana patting him on the back as if he were a child. She does it so reflexively that for a moment he almost wonders – but he can’t think about that. And anyway, surely she’d have told him. _She didn’t tell you Fitz had died_ , says a niggling voice deep in his consciousness, but Deke pushes it stubbornly away. Thinks, _This is different._

‘Rocks?’ He says aloud. ‘You mean like the monolith that ripped me out of my timeline? Well, okay, that was Enoch, but it ripped _you_ out of _my_ timeline…’ He tries and fails to remember what that was like, the flash and the bang and the discomfort of being suddenly not _there_ anymore. The fall into wide open space and blue skies. He fails to conjure anything coherent.

‘Got it in one,’ says Nana and smiles.

‘Right,’ Deke says. ‘Yeah. That’s…that’s hard to compete with I guess.’

‘He was going to bring him back,’ Nana says, losing Deke completely. She must see that because she says, ‘Will. The second time. Fitz was supposed to bring him back. He’d been stranded there for years, you know.’

Tea sprays everywhere as Deke is caught well off-guard by this latest declaration. ‘But…’ he says, ‘but…you’re supposed to….’

‘But the thing on the planet had got to him first,’ says Nana, which mercifully saves Deke the effort of trying to be cogent in his indignation on Bobo’s behalf. ‘So he had to kill him instead. Well, kill _It_. Hive. That thing. It was all a bit of a shambles, really.’

Deke risks more tea. It’s at optimum temperature, and expertly concocted. Just the right ratio of tea to milk, sugar omitted. It’s an alchemical skillset particular to Nana and Deke likes to think he’d know it anywhere. Drinking it is a mistake. He realises this as Nana says, still thoughtful, ‘He’d never have gone through that second time – well not right _then_ anyway – if Grant Ward hadn’t kidnapped us. And he only went _then_ because Ward’s crazed idea of a lark was to torture me to – ’

‘ _What_?’ says Deke, newly outraged. ‘How did I not know this? When was this?’

‘Oh, ages ago,’ Nana says positively laconically and waves a hand to signify the nothingness of torture and Grant Ward in the greater cosmic scheme of things. It makes her wedding ring flash in the glow of the electric lights, makes Deke squint. ‘I don’t suppose it came up in conversation. Ward thought if I wouldn’t talk he might get Fitz to.’

‘By _torturing you?_ ’ says Deke, who can fathom the logic but not how anyone could look at his Nana and contemplate such monstrosity. Even Kasius had only – But this train of thought is one Deke jumps sharpish for fear of accidentally verbalising it and in any way sounding like he’s mitigating the experience of being enslaved to a blue alien overlord, because he really, really doesn’t mean to.

‘What I _meant,_ ’ Nana says, ‘before you distracted me with talk of – ’

‘ – because you mentioned _torture_ like it was the milk delivery – ’

‘ – Was that you’re a lot alike. You and Fitz. I know I only remember pieces,’ and her fingers brush gently against his mug with its thickset china and aggrieved feline, ‘but I do know that. Sort of a gut feeling, you know?’

‘Yeah,’ says Deke. ‘Yeah, I do.’ This time he succeeds at swallowing his tea without disaster. Nana nurses hers, too, the silence taut but comfortable between them. It makes Deke think of his mother, lightyears ago – or is it ahead? – in some other future, arms snugged tight around him as he lay in his bunk anticipating sleep. It was nice, he thinks. And this – Nana, the tea, the companionship – is nice too. Better than nice. 

‘So,’ he says, and gestures with the multitool in Daisy’s direction. ‘Thoughts? Opinions? Kinda short of a rock that manipulates spacetime, here.’

‘Oh,’ Nana says, scrubbing her hands across her neck, ‘you are asking _completely_ the wrong person.’

‘Well that’s very helpful,’ says Deke, but there’s no heat in it. There is, he likes to think, quite a lot of Bobo. Of Fitz. His particular wry exasperation. Nana must think so too; she smiles and shakes her head, gestures at the long-since neglected watch.

‘Stop talking nonsense and solve that instead, can you?’ she says, and there’s no heat in that, either. Deke thinks there might even be a joke in it he’s not privy to, the way she says it. ‘And if it saves anyone making declarations at the end of the world, so much the better.’

There is _definitely_ a story in that. Deke can sense it the same way he used to sense Kreepers or Ramorath, the way he can still sense the closeness between Daisy and Sousa quietly coming to boil.

‘Later,’ says Nana, and it’s uncanny, really, the way she seems to read his mind. ‘When we’ve time.’

They trade smiles. He offers her what he thinks a boy scout’s salute should look like. In his defence, scouts were long defunct by the time he was growing up under the long hand of the Kree so…

‘You got it,’ he says, and gets back to work.


End file.
